Charles Olson quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Charles Olson

Charles Olson Famous Quotes & Sayings

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This
is the abstract, this
is the cold doing, this
is the almost impossible

A poem is a 'line' between any two points in creation.

Whatever you have to say, leave The roots on, let them Dangle And the dirt Just to make clear Where they come from.

The body

whips the soul. In its great desire
it demands the elixir

In the roar of spring,
transmutations.

Fact is based upon vulgar matter.

By night only crazy things
like the full moon and the whippoorwill

and us, are busy.

I hope you're representing the devil's advocate.

Not one death but many,
not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is
the law

The flowers are ravined
by bees, the fruit blossoms

are thrown to the ground, the wind
the rain forces everything.

I take space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.

One loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born.

I remember way back when I was young, 10 years ago.

Is it not the play of the mind we are after? Is it not that that shows a mind is there at all?

I was playing catch with the European audience.

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

What pudor pejorocracy affronts
how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot
what breeds where dirtiness is law
what crawls
below

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

Love is form, and cannot be without
important substance

I am happy to have some friends here in the kitchen.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature.

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION

You can do anything, literally, right? That's one of the exciting possibilities of the present.

The original in man is that which articulates him from the very outset upon something other than himself.

Forgive me if I sleep until I wake up.

I'm one of the cliches that has grown up.

All that matters is that the thing be the thing of the thing.

When will government cease being a nuisance to everybody?

I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.

Bees
dig the plum blossoms

the soul is / proprioceptive

This country has been unconscious, and it's got to awake. That's my belief.

I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.

We all want what's been suddenly disallowed.

This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of the water on water.

And all now is war
where so lately there was peace,
and the sweet brotherhood, the use
of tilled fields.

We're all moving, moving, moving. Isn't it nice?

Knowledge is the harvest of attention

There is a grace of life which is still yours, my dear Europe.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

The Canadian voice is still too rustic.

I sound like Homer. I mean Winslow Homer.

Of rhythm is image/ of image is knowing/ of knowing there is/ a construct

O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl - a bit like Crab Nebula - do for now.

What can we do
when even the public conveyances
sing?
how can we go anywhere,
even cross-town
how get out of anywhere

Atlantis will rise again.

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only/ eyes in all heads,/ to be looked out of.

Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher
will not indicate a favoring wind,
or avert the thunderbolt.

I'm trying to climb up both walls at once.

The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.

What does not change is the will to change

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.